At 9:38:18 pm Pacific time, someone from Brooklyn NY visited this site. They were on a Mac OSX system, and came via this The Caucus post, to read Steve Audio’s post, via an Earthlink IP address. That reader was our 2 millionth visitor after 4 years and 4 months of continuous blogging. If they contact me with that IP address, I’ll send them a free book. Thank you, all of you, for sticking with us so long, as the AS team has changed through the years. I’ve personally put up over 5,650 posts in that time, (averaging more than 3 per day), preferring to post quantity over quality, obviously.

I just came back from the Obama speech at the University of Oregon. It was a smaller crowd than six weeks ago; I had several friends who chose not to go because of the 12 block lines from last time, and I think many others were thinking the same. They shoulda gone. I showed up 15 minutes before his speec was scheduled to begin and was in the gate within 10 minutes. The basketball coach from rival OSU was giving the warmup speech (he’s Obama’s brother in law). He was followed by Congressman Peter DeFazio, then Obama, who began about 10 minutes late.

I was far from the stage and security wouldn’t allow me to use a tripod, so with the zoom lens, I couldn’t limit my hand movement longer than 10 to 20 seconds… and ultimately I gave up trying to get him on video.

But some distinct impressions came across. Early on I heard a few notes common to his standard stump speeches. But then he veered into numerous policy concerns, bringing up a few things I hadn’t heard elsewhere. Like Darfur. And specific Constitution breaches such as wiretapping, lack of due process, rendition, torture, and habeus corpus. As he rattled off that string of legal violations, the crowd response grew to one of the two biggest cheers of the night.

The other came as he discussed his intent to break the influence of lobbyists on the nation’s agenda. And after the rousing speech, he quieted and defined himself, his family background, Michelle’s family background, all in a quieter more personal tone. Not the usual sort of end one exppects after building such an impressive audience response.

He didn’t sound tired at all, but it suggested to me he’s making it clear that he intends to define himself instead of letting opponents and the media sopin him as something else. Overall, I was glad we didn’t get much of a canned speech like he’d delivered the first time around. He spoke absolutely respectfully about Clinton and her supporters, claimed their differences were minor compared to the policy differences of McCain, tore into him a bit, then came back to reassure everyone that McCain would face a fully united Dem party by November.

It was hardly the speech of soaring oratory he was delivering just three months ago, but it definitely sounded authentic and personal and detailed and ultimately effective. And it sounded like a guy testing new themes to use after halftime: defining himself directly, discussing energy policy at length (knocking McCain’s gas tax holiday proposal without mentioning Hillary’s), tying the push for national health care as a struggle that began in Truman’s time. Now, compared to the Obama of several months ago, he connects at a more personal level. It’ll be interesting to see how those messages are assessed and reassembled for the second half, which he clearly signaled would come after Oregon’s votes are tallied in 11 days.